"On the face of it, art history seemed
a gentile profession. For one thing,

the
study of Christian art was its center. In addition, there was an ancient
Jewish injunction against

making graven images. But the fact is, the

field was filled with
Jews. One might

even
say it was shaped by them.

Art history is

characterized
in this century by studies in connoisseurship, formalist analysis,

the study of iconography and iconology, and
social analyses.
Jews have been prominent in all categories." Eunice Lipton,
in Rubin-Dorsky/Fishkin. People of the Book. Thirty Scholars Reflect
on Their Jewish Identities. Press of American Studies Association,
1996

"Some eyebrows may
have been raised at the awareness of Baltimore's Jewish 'Art

Mafia.'
At the

time, Arnold Lehman was director of the Baltimore

Musem

of Art, Sergio Commissiona was music director of the

Baltimore
Symphony (in Meyerhoff Hall), and Frederick Lazarus IV,

an arts

administrator,
was president of the Maryland Institute College

of Art. Also,

Herbert Kessler, a medievalist ... , chaired the well-

regarded
art history department at John Hopkins [University]."

George Goodman, A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors and Benefactors of American
Art Museums. Modern Judaism, February 1998, p. 123

"A
member of the [Jewish] Warburg banking family single-handedly started
up the field of art history ... [CANTOR, p. 271] ... All the art history
departments in the world are direct descendants of Aby Warburg's Institute
(moved from London in 1932 to escape the Nazis) and his great Jewish
disciple, Erwin Panofsky. Is it anamalous that a Jew would have been
so creative in the study of art that was so little cultivated in Jewish
tradition? All the more that a liberated Jew should pursue art history.
But one can see a Judaizing tendency in Warburg's method of art historical
criticism. The picture is studied for its 'iconology,' its pattern
of ideas illustrating textual passages. Art is therby approached in
hermeneutic fashion, again recalling Talmudic exegesis, rather than
for its aesthetic content. Yet the most significant aspect of Warburg's
development in art history is the demonstration that market capitalism
could embrace and fund a purely cultural and academic operation. The
distinct equality of capital was not its materialism, but its liquidity,
the fungible capactiy of capital to transform into any commodity,
including art and humanities literature that represents a dynamic
power in society. Aby Warburg's historical and critical mastery of
art was structurally the same as his brother's master in their international
bank of money and its investment potential. The transormative interaction
between art and capital is central to the nature of the market economy."
Norman Cantor,The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, HarperCollins, 1994,
p. 271

"It is my contention that the art world
of the 1980s represented a kind of

renaissance

for
Jewish American artists who came of age in that decade.

The list
of young Jewish American

artists
who took center stage in the

80's is long --

early in the decade we might think of Barbara Kruger,

Laurie Simmons,

Sherrie Levine, R.M. Fischer, Donald Sultan, Julian

Schnabel, and
David

Salle. Later, the work of Ross Bleckner, Terry

Winters,

Haim Steinbach, and Meyer Vaisman come to the fore ...

What originally
motivated

me to explore this subject [of growing

Jewish artist prominence]

was
the strange fact that there has been an

inexplicable

silence surrounding it. Especially in this era of multicultural

awareness, it is

surprising,
to say the least, that no one has mentioned

this

phenomenon ... On

e possible reason for

this
silence about a Jewish artist renaissance in

the 80's is that at
the

same time a great fluorescence of Jewish influence

in the areas
of

philanthropy,
business, finance and the bastions of high

society was

taking
place ... By the 1980s ... in cities with large Jewish

populations,
like

New York, Jews had largely replaced the older WASP

elite as standard
bearers of

socialpower and prestige in the evolving

American

postwar ethnic meritocracy."

Thus
a new and yet unexamined social paradigm arose. Jews ... [who]

had

championed
the marginal culture of Modernism had suddenly

become the

pillar of the American establishment. At the same time, a

new

of
Jewish artists was emerging whose work was collected

as often as
not by

Jews
in the cultural elite as part of a continuing

tradition

Jewish
support for contemporary art."
art critic Peter Halley,
self-defined as 'half-Jewish,' The Eighties and Jewishness, The
New Art Examiner, June 1997, p. 26-28

Jewish
author Howard Jacobson wrote in 1993 about his experiences with prominent
New York City art critic Peter Schjeldhal:
'I came to New York to be Jewish,' [Schjeldhal] once told me:
'Did you make it?'
'No.'
'What were you before?'
'Porcelain-sink Lutheran.'
'And now? Since you haven't made it across as one of us?'
He paused. He wasn't sure he want to be THAT un-Jewish.
'A certain transformation has occurred; but a certain gulf remains.'
It takes me a little while to put it together -- the fact that just
about every gallery/space/loft we go into is run by a Jew. This isn't
Jewish how I like it. This is slow-drawl, camp Jewish, retreating, high-toned,
not very sense-of-humorish Jewish. The pallid women gallery-owners whose
walls and wine we absorb are also Jewish.'"Howard Jacobson, Roots Schmoots. Journey Among Jews. The Overlook Press, NY, 1993,
1995, p. 84-85

Holocaust
literature ... Vainshtein's tatoos include a violin player ...

surrounded
by

hanging
corpses, anguished faces and Zyklon B, the

killing
agent in the gas chambers. The screaming faces of prisoners

being

gassed
are tattooed on one breast."Dora Apel,The Tattooed Jew. New Art Examiner, June 1997, p. 12-

"The chimney [in a painting by Jewish
artist R. B. Kitaj] functions as an indictment of Christianity. Hence
Jewish identity in Kitaj's painting is achieved in opposition to Christianity
... Innocense and guilt: Jew and Gentile." Juliet Steyn,The Jew: Assumptions
of Identity, Cassell, London and New York, 1999

"In
the past twenty years I've sold at auction thousands of Nazi relics
and documents. And nearly always such sales have evoked criticism, harrowing
experiences, or even threats on my life ... Today the big threat to
me is not from bombs [Hamilton once had a bomb threat for having a Hitler
photo for sale in his gallery window] but from collectors who are stampeding
me and other autograph dealers in their frenzy to stock up on letters
and documents of Hitler and his henchmen before the price goes through
the roof. A letter of Hitler's is now worth five of Churchill's and
ten of Franklin D. Roosevelt's. Who's in the Third Reich rat race? The
Germans are buying. The British are buying. But most of all it's Jewish
collectors in America. They big with aliases or anagrams, from behind
pillars or half-closed doors, or signal the auctioneer furtively. Their
names are top secret. Is it just the fascination of evil and violence?
Maybe. But as one Jewish collector explained to me: 'It's like having
the head of the hunter on the wall instead of the hunted.' One of the
outstanding Nazi collections in America was formed by the late Philip
D. Sang, whose collection of Judaica I recently appraised for presentation
to Brandeis University. I helped Sang to build his superb assemblage
of Jewish letters and documents and I helped him to gather his huge
and important Nazi collection. Among the historic items that came from
my sales were the Nazi top-secret plan for the invasion of Holland and
Belgium and Mussolini's own copy of Nietzche's Man and Superman, annotated
with Il Duce's own ideas for implementing the philosphers's vision.
Another Nazi collector, famed for his physical education courses, once
told me that his entire family was wiped out in an Austrian concentration
camp during the Holocaust. Yet I never met any man so enthralled with
the Nazis, especially the more brutal of them. He liked to ensconce
his villains in spectacular frames."
Charles Hamilton.. Auction Madness. An Uncensored Look Behind the
Velvet Drapes of the Great Auction Houses, Everest House, Publishers,
New York, 1981,

p. 172, 174

The Times: Another Dupe in Charles Saatchi's Con Game. New
York Observer, November 15, 1999
[Those mentioned below: lawyer Floyd Abrams, collector Charles
Saatchi, and museum director Arnold Lehman are all Jewish,
as is -- to his credit --the author of this article, Hilton Kramer]
"As expected, a Federal judge has rejected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s
attempt to withhold funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for exhibiting
the odious Sensation exhibition. Once again, First Amendment
fundamentalist Floyd Abrams has made the world a safer place for the
market in the foulest varieties of obscene expression ... What is
now beyond question is that the entire project of bringing this shabby
inventory from the Saatchi Collection to Brooklyn has from the outset
been what even The [New York] Times, after publishing some 60 or more
news stories, editorials and reviews in ardent defense of the exhibition,
has finally been obliged to concede is 'an ethically dubious enterprise'
... Because of the Sensation scandal, all the world now knows
exactly how this market-manipulation venture works. Mr. Saatchi first
commissions work that is guaranteed to cause outrage, then promotes
it as his latest 'discoveries,' then importunes once-respectable institutions
like the Royal Academy of Art or the Tate Gallery to endorse it, and
then makes a killing in the art-auction market. This is what now passes
for 'avant-garde' art in London–and, of course, in New York–and it
has proved to be a highly successful business enterprise. Thanks to
the total lack of conscience, tact and taste which Arnold L. Lehman,
the director of the Brooklyn Museum, brought to the organization,
the financing and the promotion of the Sensation show, all
art museums that traffic in this particular vein of 'cutting-edge'
hucksterism have also suffered a significant loss in public confidence.
The sheer quantity of cynical hokum that it has long been standard
practice for our art institutions to invoke in defense of whatever
horror or inanities the art traders are currently promoting as avant-garde
is no longer as persuasive as it once was for anyone not involved
in the market. We haven’t witnessed the death throes of this phenomenon
yet, but some of the other institutional defenses of Sensation
have shown signs of moral fatigue and a distinct diminution of mental
acuity."

A New Jewish Elite: Curators, Directors
and Benefactors of American Art Museums.Modern Judaism, 1998, 18.1,
p. 119-152
[To access this article, go to google.com
and type in for your search: George Goodwin
jewish art. When the link comes up, select the cached
version.]
"Presently, there are several Jews in the highest ranks of American
museum professionals. Michael Heyman is the Smithsonian's secretary
(or chief administrator). Elsewhere in Washington, Alan Shestack
is deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, Neil Benezra
is chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (where
Stephen Weil recently retired as deputy director), and Stephen
Ostrow is curator of prints and drawings at the Library of Congress.
Beyond the federal domain, David Levy is director of the Corcoran
Gallery." This article goes on and on like this, in a detailed
look at Jewish prominence in the art world throughout the country.There are actually two separate articles on this subject by Goodwin
in the Modern Judaism journal.
MOMA Board Member Quits After Indiscreet Purchase.The Art Newspaper
[Great Britain], June 5, 2000
"The publisher and billionaire [Jewish] art collector Samuel
I. (Si) Newhouse has quit the board of trustees of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York after buying a 1913 Cubist Picasso painting
that was deaccessioned from the museum’s collection. Newhouse, who
controls Conde Nast Publications, Random House, and a chain of newspapers,
had been on the MoMA board for twenty-seven years. A museum spokesman
said that Newhouse had violated a museum policy that bans trustees
from buying works from the institution. In this case, the 1913 'Man
with guitar' was sold from the collection to raise funds for new acquisitions.
The guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors discourage
the selling of art from museum collections except for the purpose
of buying similar works of art. The museum appears to have been acting
within those rules in this deal. The painting was sold by the museum
to an art dealer, said to be Larry Gagosian (from whom Newhouse has
purchased many paintings in the past) and then sold to Newhouse for
$10 million. New York State requires that museums which receive government
funds deaccession works at public auction, a law established after
the Metropolitan Museum of Art surprised donors with the sale of a
number of paintings in the Seventies. The Guggenheim’s lucrative sale
at Sotheby’s of works by Kandinsky, Modigliani and others in 1990
to buy the Panza di Biuma collection of minimal and conceptual art
was condemned as unethical. Yet private museums, like the Guggenheim
and MoMA, are permitted by New York State law and the AAMD to sell
their works privately."

The
ARTnews 200 Top Collectors, by Milton Esterow. ARTnews,
Summer 201The owner of this influential newspaper, Esterow, is Jewish as
are at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collector families
listed here as a tease to an off-line article. The Jewish ones are
Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris
and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee
and Henry R. Kravis, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole
and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

Helmut
Newton: The Master. The Difficult World of the Greatest Fashion Photographer
Who Ever Lived. The Independent [Great
Britain], May 9, 2001
"To radical feminists, [Jewish photographer Helmut] Newton
is the Antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman on all
fours with a saddle on her back, and another sitting in her underwear
on an unmade bed, with a gun in her mouth ... Newton's vision is fuelled
by sex, status, power and, above all, voyeurism - there are often
extras in his pictures who gaze at the women centre-stage. Those are,
of course, also the things that make fashion tick. Small wonder, then,
that much of the photographer's most successful imagery has become
far more famous than the garments he has chosen to photograph ...
Newton's influence is everywhere ... In the Sixties and Seventies,
Newton's decadent vision may have been labelled "porno chic", but
today the rest of the world has finally caught up with him and it's
just plain chic. There is barely a stylist, photographer or designer
working in fashion today who can fail to acknowledge Newton as an
influence."

The Frog
Prince. The Independent, [Great Britain],
January 4, 2000
"Serge Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg] ... is still
most famous in Britain for his number one Je t'aime moi non plus:
the scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago.
He and [Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that
the single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican
... Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever produced
... Echoes of his favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against
a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary
records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen ... Gainsbourg
appeared to relish the onset of old age as giving him licence for
the kind of appalling behaviour normally permitted to youth. Towards
the end of his life, the singer's media appearances became ritual
provocations: in one television broadcast, he subjected a veteran
paratrooper - horrified by Gainsbourg's dub version of the Marseillaise
- to a torrent of obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate
condoms. On another notorious live show, sharing a platform with a
young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg, then 58, turned to the presenter
Michel Drucker and declared, in English, 'I want to fuck her.'"

An
Avant-Garde Impresario: Julien Levy. Art
in America. March 1999
"Julien Levy, the promoter of Surrealism and pioneering
New York art dealer of the 1930s and '40s, was the subject of a recent
exhibition that wove together art works and archival materials ...
. Although best remembered as the preeminent American dealer of Surrealism,
Levy first exhibited and sold a range of European and American photographs
... [Salvadore] Dali would become central to Levy's stable ... In
terms of conceptual innovation and creative energy, Julien Levy and
his gallery are central to the history of American art between the
wars."

Modligliani:
The Pure Bohemian. Kirkus Reviews,
October 1, 1991
"Modigliani, explains British biographer [Elizabeth Fry]
Rose, was the product of an upper-class Jewish- Italian family. After
art studies in Livorno, Florence, and Venice, where he spent more
time in cafes and brothels than in class, he arrived in Paris in 1906,
seeking fame and fortune. Within weeks, the somber reality of poverty
set in--moving from seedy hotel to seedy hotel, he wound up living
in a wooden shack in Montmartre. There, and later in Montparnasse,
he met many of the foremost artists, writers, and 'characters' of
the day, including Picasso, Soutine, Utrillo, Cocteau, Hans Arp, and
Fernand L‚ger. Because of his success with women, Modigliani had easy
access to free models ('Women of a beauty worth painting or sculpting
often seem encumbered by their clothes,' he said). Rose seems torn
between downplaying what she refers to as the 'Modigliani myth' and
relating dozens of stories that have served to create that myth. Included
are accounts of how Modigliani danced wildly in the moonlight with
a famous courtesan; of how one of his first collectors was a senior
police official who first met the painter when he was jailed for drunkenness;
and of how the artist's only one-man gallery show was closed 'for
indecency' the day it opened."

Stealing
Beauty. Los Angeles, July 2000
"[Jeffrey] Hirsch, who had initially been hired
as editor of UCLA Magazine and head of campus publications in April
1994 and was now in charge of overseeing an array of university magazines,
marketing projects and annual reports, had an incredibly diligent
and time-consuming secret life. In four years, he had generated armloads
of falsified documents to acquire hundreds of pieces of art and other
prize possessions ... The tally was actually a staggering $480,000,
used to buy paintings, photographs, fine furniture, rare books and
assorted knickknacks, all of which were hidden in a public self-storage
space that even his wife of 11 years didn't know about."

Kahlomania.
The age.com. [Australia], July 4, 2001
"Overshadowed by her husband - famous muralist Diego Rivera -
during her lifetime, [Frida] Kahlo [whose father
was Jewish] is now a global cult figure. The feisty woman with
the striking stare and tempestuous love-life has inspired ballets,
operas, books, biography, films and plays. Dozens, if not hundreds,
of websites pay homage. A religion, 'Kahloism,' worships her as the
one, true god. 'Kahlomania' is about to hit Australia: a new play
about her opens tonight in Melbourne, a major exhibition will be launched
in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra next week, a Hollywood
movie will hit Australian screens in December ... Frida Kahlo is not
only arguably the world's most famous female artist, but also one
commanding the highest prices. Last year, a Kahlo self-portrait painted
in 1929 fetched $10 million, creating a record for Latin American
art and for a female artist. A Kahlo the size of a chicken's egg was
sold last November by Sotheby's for $400,000 ... Memorabilia including
a letter opener, dried flowers, a watch and ribbons went for $110,000
in a sale of Kahlo curios, prompting a Latin American art expert in
New York to observe that people were vying for shreds of Kahlo's garments."

Vanity
Fare. Phoenix New Times. June 7,
2001
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Apparently,
it's high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman,
judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican
artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part
of 'Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century Mexican
Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection' ... Contemporary acquisitions
-- which are, overall, of better quality and more engaging than the
work of the older Mexican art legends -- have been expertly guided
by longtime Gelman friend Robert Littman, ex-director of Mexico
City's now-defunct Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo (referred to
popularly as the Centro Cultural). As president of the Vergel Foundation,
which is responsible for carrying on the Gelman legacy, Littman seems
to possess an infallible eye, which cannot be said for the Gelmans'
original aesthetic vision ... Both [Jacques and Natasha] were Jewish,
married in 1941 and [they] remained in Mexico because of the Second
World War ... Always nattily attired and fur-coat-swathed, Jacques
and Natasha were the stereotypical film producer and glamorous socialite
spouse. To cement their status in Mexican high society, in 1943, Jacques
commissioned Diego Rivera to paint Natasha's portrait, which appears
in the exhibition. Though the most famous of the Mexican mural painters
at the time, Rivera often paid the rent by doing portraits of wealthy
socialites ... Frida Kahlo's Natasha portrait of 1943 captures the
woman, crowned with sausage curls al modo and draped in a fur stole,
with a strangely flat effect ... To anyone familiar with Mexican art
history, the Gelman exhibition is not a well-balanced overview of
Mexican art at mid-century ... [it is] a classically status-driven,
gotta-be-better-than-the-Gomezes compilation reflecting one type of
art collector's psychic preoccupation with memorializing himself and
notable public figures with which he has socialized. Frankly, it's
one more befitting a newly moneyed, 18th-century Dutch burgher than
a discerning, visionary collector seeking emerging and mid-career
artists' best and most enduring work."

National
Collection Needs a Major Lucien Freud. The
Age, Australia
"Australia's national art collection needed a major Lucien
Freud painting, National Portrait Gallery director Andrew Sayers
said today. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) is planning to
buy Lucien Freud's painting After Cezanne from the artist for
$8 million - if it can raise the last $1 million. This would make
it the NGA's most expensive painting ... Mr Sayers said the Art Gallery
of South Australia showed extraordinary foresight and bought a Freud
in 1950 and the Art Gallery of Western Australia had a painting of
a nude man holding a rat ... Mr Sayers said Freud, the 78-year-old
grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was not a household
name but was an artist's artist."

Eli
Langer. Mercer Union Digital Archives,
1979-1995
[A compilation of art gallery press releases and local news articles
about a controversial 1993 Toronto art exhibition by Jewish artist
Eli Langer]
"Eli Langer's show of eight paintings and various small
pencil drawings is much talked about in Toronto art circles these
days -- much talked about because no one knows what to make of it.
In a community that sets few limits when it comes to explicitness,
Langer's subject matter breaks one of the last taboos: the sexuality
of children. The paintings, gorgeously rendered in a duo toned chiaroscuro
of red and black, show children and adults in various forms of sexual
play. A naked child sits on the lap of a naked man who might be her
grandfather. A masked intruder climbs through a window into a bedroom
where a naked girl straddles the neck of an adult and very erect man
who lies on the bed ... Let it be said then, that they are horrible
-- both the paintings and the pencil drawings which feature a dreary
catalogue of don'ts (children masturbating, performing fellatio or
buggering each other). The whole show is a self-conscious, juvenile
prodding of its own excrement." -- Globe and Mail. Langer
is Jewish. And "his father is an amateur Holocaust historian."
[Toronto Life, 1-20-94, p. A21]

Police
Obscenity Squad Raids Saatchi Gallery.Guardian [London], March 10, 2001
"The Saatchi gallery has been raided by officers from Scotland
Yard's obscene publications unit and warned that they will return
to seize pictures in its current exhibition, I am a Camera,
unless the offending images are removed before the gallery opens its
doors to the public again. The Metropolitan police confirmed last
night that officers had visited the gallery twice this week after
three complaints under anti-child pornography legislation and a report
was being forward to the crown prosecution service. The exhibition
features the work of a group of artists and photographers selected
by Charles Saatchi himself and taken from his personal collection
of photographs and paintings. It has been running for eight weeks
and has been reviewed in most of the broadsheet papers and magazines
from the Tatler to the Telegraph, without any public
complaints to the gallery."

I'll
Be Your Mirror. [Book Review of Nan Goldin's work; Amazon.com]
"Based on an exhibition of the same title at the Whitney Museum
of American Art this collection of more than 300 pictures documents
the alternative culture of Nan Goldin's friends and acquaintances
in the arty bohemian substrata of Manhattan. Goldin turns her camera
outward to record transvestites carousing in downtown clubs and the
social impact of AIDS and drugs; and inward to look with unblinking
intimacy at her friends, her lovers of both sexes, and herself. She
records her boyfriend masturbating. She shows him on the toilet. She
shows her own battered face in a mirror after he beats her up. She
traces the decline and death of her friend Cookie Mueller. Goldin
has created a stark record of her urban demi-monde."
Nan Goldin's Retrospective and Recovery: Framing Feminism, AIDS, and
Addiction. Chapter 6. [This scholarly analysis of Nan Goldin's
work, apparantly posted at Syracuse University, floats -- alas --
uncredited in cyberspace]
"It may be correct to partially attribute renewed interest in
[Nan] Goldin's career to the currently fashionable status
of Goldin’s subject matter over the past 25 years: 'the urban demimonde,
the world of drag queens and slum goddesses, of Lower East Side nightclubbers
and Tokyo teen-agers in black rubber.' Goldin's work has even been
a model for the 'fashionable addiction' that I discussed previously.
The popular mainstreaming of the transgressive fringes of society
(who are the stock subjects of Goldin’s work) in the 'drug chic' school
of fashion photography has liberally borrowed from Goldin's exemplary
documentary-style realism. It became common in the late '90s for young
fashion photographers to request that their lab recreate Goldin’s
style of printing and, in fact, Nan Goldin herself shot publicity
photos for the Italian fashion firm Matsuda. Even the bruised
eyes of sleepless junkies and battered women that have been the touchstone
of Goldin's photography for over two decades became a 'look' in high
fashion makeup application."

Dangerous
Curves. The Advocate, 1999
"[Lisa] Cholodenko found inspiration all around
her when she moved to New York. Originally a Valley Girl—from Encino,
Calif., no less—she came of age via college in San Francisco and a
few years of globe-trotting, including a stint with her then-girlfriend
in Israel. She even did time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant
editor and slowly moving up the Hollywood ladder until she began to
feel trapped, read about 'the new queer cinema' in New York, and vowed
to try her luck ... She was inspired by the retrospective of Nan
Goldin photographs at the Whitney. She wondered why so many lesbians
she knew suddenly had access to cheap, clean heroin and thought it
was hip. 'I’m too uptight to go there,' the 33-year-old filmmaker
demurs when asked whether she herself got into the heroin experience.
She got hooked instead on her fascination with the whole scene. The
lesbian art world, drug culture, interpersonal power plays, careerism—all
became material for her screenplay ... The main model for Lucy [the
main character in her film High Art] is more likely the late
photographer Diane Arbus. 'I was reading her biography at that
time,' Cholodenko notes. 'All the stuff about Lucy’s rich Jewish family,
her early success and later isolation from the fashion world, that
all came from my view of Arbus.' As for Goldin, at last report Cholodenko
was planning to invite the famed photographer to see High Art
for herself."

Still
Life: Jews, Photography, Memory.National Foundation for Jewish Culture,
December 1999
"George Gilbert ... independently published his groundbreaking
survey "The
Illustrated Worldwide Who's Who of Jews in Photography" in
1997, which documents 550 Jews who developed the art, science, and
business of photography, such as Ben Shahn, Alfred Steiglitz,
Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winograd, and
Annie Leibovitz, to name merely a few ... The lucid directness
of photography has allowed Jews to record the transformation of individual
identity while preserving communal memory." [There are many,
many, many well-known Jewish photographers. Here's a few: Jacques
Lowe (John F. Kennedy's personal photographer), Richard
Avedon (superstar portrait photographer of the fashion world and
celebrities), Weegee
(a New York City ambulance chaser who has been reinvented as a famous
"artist"), etc.]

After 'Dinner
Party,' Judy Chicago Feasts on Judaism.
Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco. July 14, 1996
"She is a woman of names. Born, Judy Cohen. Married, Judy
Gerowitz. Self-designated, Judy Chicago. But the name that
fills her eyes with joy today is the one her grandmother called her
-- Yudit Sipke. Twenty years ago, Chicago -- controversial
creator of the acclaimed feminist art installation 'The Dinner Party'
-- wouldn't have offered the public this particular morsel. Her first
autobiography, released in 1975, detailed Chicago's gender politics,
not her religious heritage. Judaism 'wasn't even a subject. I can't
believe I hadn't thought about it,' Chicago reflected during a Bay
Area visit last month that included an appearance at the Marin Jewish
Community Center. The recently released sequel, 'Beyond the Flower:
The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist,' includes sections about
her Jewish upbringing, her return to the fold and her eight-year,
multimedia project on the Holocaust ... Even now, the artist can't
exactly explain why she underwent a religious transformation later
in life. But she can describe how it happened. In the mid-1980s, she
met her future husband, Donald Woodman. Her two previous husbands
also had been Jewish. But this time, something was different. The
pair decided to have a Jewish wedding. When they began studying the
traditions with Renewal-movement Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, they realized
the depth of their hunger for Judaism." [CONTEXT: "There
are in halakhic {Jewish religious law} literature [that has]
repeated groupings of women in categories with slaves, minors, fools,
deaf mutes, and the like which are so offensive as to take one's breath
away ... The issue is an [anti-woman] attitude which was deeply and
systematically imbued into Judaism." Gerald Skolnick, Domestic
Violence and the Jewish Community, Sh'ma, January 19, 1996,
p. 3-4"]

Shock
Value. Jerome Witkin's Paintings Bear Witness to the Holocaust in
Graphic Detail, Jewish Journal of Greater
Los Angeles, April 21, 2000
"Jerome Witkin, perhaps the greatest figurative painter
alive, is ... most renown[ed] for his Holocaust works, which have
received an 'almost reverential' response from the curators and critics
who have visited the show ... the painter's Jewish father, who had
abandoned the family when the twins were 3, attempted suicide and
began to live, homeless, on the streets. His last words to Jerome
were, 'Go to hell.' At the age of 50, his father was found, dead,
in a diner; he had suffered a heart attack after enduring a vicious
beating by thugs. At the funeral, Jerome stood at the graveside and
realized he had hardly known his father. 'I wasn't listening to anything
except my head, which kept repeating, Who was this man?' he recalls.
To find out, Witkin began exploring his Jewish roots, avidly reading
volumes on Jewish history, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. His interest
culminated in a series of Holocaust-themed paintings."

So
Many Women, So Little Time. Salon.com,
June 7, 2001
"Jan Saudek doesn't mind admitting it: He likes a woman
with a fat ass. Unlike fellow erotic photographers such as Helmut
Newton, whose Euro-babe models seem to subsist on a diet of champagne
and heroin, Saudek, 66, happily dives head first into the mountains
and valleys of jiggling flesh proffered by his mostly Czech trollops.
Plus-size beauties are a recurring theme in his work. Sometimes they
bend over while Saudek spanks their glorious, globelike keisters with
handfuls of switches. Or they might spank each other, skip rope or
simply crouch nude on all fours with wildflowers crowning their heads
and saggy green socks on their feet. Indeed, in one of the Prague
maestro's favorite hand-tinted, sepia prints, titled 'The Burden,'
Saudek stands nearly naked with his back to the camera while his former
wife, Maria, sits atop his shoulders -- her creamy, gargantuan derrière
apparently having swallowed Saudek from the neck up. Looking at that
woman's divine posterior, bathed as it is in blue, one fantasizes
about drowning in the folds of her massive sex ... The enormously
prolific Saudek has been wildly popular in Europe since the '70s ...
Saudek's father, a Jewish banker, survived the concentration camp
Theresienstadt, the only brother in his family to do so."
Richard Avedon. Slate.com, December
17, 1999
"[Richard] Avedon has done much to revive the portrait
as a central genre of photographic art. His only serious rival is
Irving Penn, and his epigones (whether they admit it or not)
include everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Leibovitz.
Among his precursors are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great 19th-century
British portraitist, and August Sander, who set out to compile
a comprehensive visual record of German life between the world wars.
But while Avedon's portraits clearly represent his bid for artistic
immortality--a bid he has assiduously devoted much of the past decade
to mounting--they represent only one facet of his work ... Avedon's
ubiquity, the extraordinary variety of subjects and styles, and his
willingness to shoot album covers, posters, and advertisements as
well as museum-worthy black-bordered prints, have occasionally offended
purists. Hilton Kramer, for instance, called Avedon's 1994
retrospective at the Whitney (which produced a gorgeous book titled
Evidence: 1944-1994) 'the ultimate capitulation to celebrity,
money and fashion at the expense of art.'"
Las Vegas Spotlight: Backers of Guggenheim, Hermitage Museum Undaunted
by Criticism. Gaming Magazine, 2001
"Here we are in Las Vegas, a city where, until a few years ago,
the term 'culture' referred mostly to the faux marble in the casino
bathrooms, and the venerable Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
is preparing to open not one but two museums. That irony, and the
concept of 'my, how things change', is not lost on the projects' backers.
'The fact that it is based in Las Vegas is creating something of a
stir,' said Thomas Krens [Jewish?], director of the Guggenheim foundation.
That said, 'nowhere do the rules say you can't come to Las Vegas.'
'Evolution is what a place like Las Vegas is all about,' said Sheldon
Adelson, chairman of the board of Las Vegas Sands Inc.,
developers of The Venetian, site of the new museums. 'Las Vegas
keeps doing things that amaze other people, and it keeps re-inventing
itself.' Krens and Adelson were speaking at a Jewish Federation meeting
and press conference to introduce the project ... The museum will
open with 'The Art of the Motorcycle,' which Krens said was 'hugely
successful' at the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao, Spain ... Criticism
of the Guggenheim entering the Las Vegas market has come from various
fronts. An article in The Independent of London was headlined:
'Finest art museums join forces to open an outpost in the cultural
desert of Las Vegas' and suggested the museums follow Strip tradition
and use fakes. But the same article ascribed much of the criticism
to 'art snobs'and quoted Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage,
as saying, 'Las Vegas is America.'" [Las Vegas, of course is
largely Jewish-founded --see Jewish Influence in
Popular Culture]

Judge
Allows Suit Over 15M in Nazi Loot. New York Daily News, September 6, 2001
"The secretive [Jewish] Wildenstein clan, owners of an
art fortune worth billions, suffered a legal setback yesterday in
a battle over eight rare religious manuscripts allegedly looted by
the Nazis during World War II. A state judge refused to dismiss a
lawsuit brought against the Wildenstein Gallery in Manhattan
by the heirs of Alphonse Kann, a French Jew whose vast art
collection was pillaged by Hitler's henchmen after he fled to England
in 1940. The works, 15th, 16th and 17th century Christian prayer books
from the French aristocracy, are worth an estimated $15 million. The
suit was filed in 1999 by Francis Warin, Kann's great-nephew,
who wants the manuscripts returned. 'The Nazi inventory establishes
the Kann family's ownership,' said Stephen Somerstein, Warin's
lawyer. 'It's clearly identified as having been taken from the Kann
mansion by the Nazis in 1940.' Hyman Schafer, lawyer for the
Wildensteins, said the suit exceeded the statute of limitations under
French law."
In Depth Art News: "Gemma Levine": Portrait Photographer
25 Years, absolutearts.com, [exhibition
at the National Portrait Gallery, London]
"Gemma Levine is one of Britain's leading portrait photographers,
with a marvellous capacity for capturing the character of her subjects
... Her career in photography was initiated by a commission from [Jewish
publishing mogul] George Weidenfeld to take photographs for
two books in Israel collaborating with [prime ministers] Moshe
Dayan and Golda Meir.

E.M.
Gombrich, Author and Theorist Who Defined Art History Is Dead at 92,
New York Times, November 7, 2001
"Ernst Gombrich, an author of panoramic erudition and
probably the world's best-known art historian thanks to his best-selling
'Story of Art,' died on Saturday in London, where he had lived since
moving from his native Vienna in 1936 ... Like Meyer Schapiro,
the other great art historian of his generation, Mr. Gombrich was
a lucid writer."

Estee
Lauder Heir Opens Own Art Museum, Virtual New York [from UPI], November
16, 2001
"The Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art opened
to the public Friday, the latest addition to New York's museum mile
on upper Fifth Avenue. The museum is the pet project of cosmetics
heir Ronald Lauder, former U.S. Ambassador to Austria and a
onetime aspirant to the New York mayoralty. It reflects his passion
for Central European art produced during the early years of the 20th
century as a revolt against academic art. Visitors to the Neue Galerie
view avant-garde art from the twilight years of the Hohenzollern-Hapsburg
empires and the years between the two World Wars in a magnificent
French Louis XIII-style brick and limestone mansion with a view of
Central Park. It was the home of Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the uncrowned
queen of American society, until her death in 1952. The mansion at
the corner of 86th Street was owned by the Yivo Institute for Jewish
studies when Lauder and his project partner, the late art dealer Serge
Sabarsky, purchased it for $9 million six years ago. It took four
years and more than $10 million more to renovate the structure as
a museum, restoring the polished marble and paneled interiors with
gilt detailing to their original elegance ... Lauder has given some
of his collection, including an important Klimt painting, to the New
York's Museum of Modern Art of which he is board chairman."

Two
Brothers from Montreal Make Good -- and Waves,
[Jewish] Forward, November 30, 2001
"Canada's Jewish community kvelled when, at the turn of the new
century, Montreal-born, look-alike brothers Victor and Robert
Rabinovitch were named to head two of the most important government-owned
cultural institutions in the country. The brainy, 50-something brothers
are sons of a lower middle-class Jewish family. Younger brother Victor
is president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp.,
the country's largest and busiest museum, while his older brother
Robert is president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Their appointments, the apex of careers built largely in the federal
civil service, were 'a source of naches [pride] for the entire
Jewish community,'' said Irving Abella, a Toronto historian
and former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. 'They are energetic
and dedicated, and never tried to hide their Jewish background.'"

Yizhak
Rabin - The Original Famous Painting, ebay.com,
March 1, 2002
[For sale] "The original famous painting of ISRAEL Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin that was gunned down by an ultra-nationalist assassin
because is peace policy, the painting was located a few meters from
where the assassin took place,on the painting there are the original
inscriptions that the people wrote, expressing there feelings, there
is a date on the painting,dated a few days after the murder. the painting
size is 98*144 inch, it is possible to get a personal designating
from the artist ...Opening bid $500,000."

L.A.
Museums: Saved by the Jews,Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles,
August 16, 2002
"The art scene in Los Angeles, like its popular culture counterpart
of film and television, is known by insiders as having a very significant
Jewish presence. Drift through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA) and it is difficult to avoid noticing the prevalence of Jewish
names. It is well-known that the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art,
a smaller modern art museum that opened its doors in 1983, owes its
existence largely to the efforts of the late Marcia Weisman
— she had been the guiding force behind the idea, the fundraising,
and the support of local artists — and its recent renovation to a
$5 million contribution from David Geffen of Dreamworks. When
we add the Armand Hammer Museum, (opened in 1990 and now run
by UCLA,) and the Norton Simon Museum (1974), and the Getty
Center’s Jewish Presidents (past and present) we might conclude that
without the involvement of L.A.’s Jewish population, art in the city
would be greatly diminished if not invisible. On one level, of course,
none of this is new. Jews have historically been collectors, producers
and consumers of art. Culture matters. But there is a fork in the
road here. The cultural life of the city, not just its Jewish community,
is being shaped by this new — Jewish — cultural elite ... By playing
a central role today in the shaping of our national culture, Jews
have moved inside the society, and in the process, have helped America
become partly Jewish. It is a dramatic step towards inclusion."

Bringing
Dance to Prayer: Activist Wins ‘Genius’ Grant,Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 1, 2002
"'Liz Lerman is the only true genius I know,” declares
Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Washington’s Temple Micah, 'and I know
some very, very intelligent people.' It’s taken the rest of the world
a little longer to accept what the Reform rabbi believed in his heart
from the moment he met the activist choreographer more than a decade
ago. Choreographer, dancer, community organizer, teacher and now public
persona, Lerman last week received a five-year MacArthur Fellowship
for $500,000, a prize that carries with it the public recognition
of genius status. The fellowship, which comes with no strings attached,
is given to 20 to 30 individuals annually. Those selected in the highly
secretive process demonstrate outstanding creative and intellectual
achievement in a diversity of fields ... Much of her work has been
deeply rooted in exploring Jewish themes and issues, like her 1991
piece 'The Good Jew?' which pressed the issue of being Jewish enough
in a contemporary society ... Growing up in a Reform Jewish household
in Milwaukee, Lerman found that passion for social activism
in her father, who worked with the Anti-Defamation League ... When
Lerman joined the board of Synagogue 2000, the national collective
of Jewish organizations and rabbis that is re-envisioning the synagogue
for the 21st century, she had worked her way into establishment Judaism
without forgoing her roots or her cutting-edge philosophy that dance
can — and must — make a difference."

Spying
can be art says ex-Mossad agent,Times of India (Reuters), October 30,
2002
"A good spy is like a good artist, rising above the mundane to
touch excellence, says the former Israeli secret service agent who
captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In his 73 years Peter
Malkin, one-time operations chief at the Israeli intelligence
service Mossad, has accomplished enough to fill three lifetimes. 'If
you do things well, they become artistic,' he said during a visit
to Budapest to promote the Hungarian translation of his book, Eichmann
in my Hands. 'In every field, there are some who do it in an artistic
way and others who do it as a job,' said the man born Zvi Malchin
in British Palestine in 1929. 'If you do it perfectly, in can
be artistic, whether it's spying or painting.' Painting brought Malkin
international recognition, but he can now reveal some of his Mossad
past, for which he was twice awarded the Prime Minister's Medal, Israel's
highest honour."

Poet's
Winding Path Leads to a Job as a Foundation President,Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 17,
2002
"Edward Hirsch, a prize-winning poet and the beneficiary
of prodigious amounts of philanthropic support, will become president
of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in January.
Mr. Hirsch has been awarded a 'genius' fellowship from the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rome Prize, which
allowed him to live and write in Rome for a year, and a fellowship
from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Over the last five years,
he has served on the foundation's selection committee, which chooses
180 or so fellows out of a field of several thousand ... He is active
in three national poetry groups, the Academy of American Poets, the
Poetry Society of America, and Poet's House."

Behind
a Century of Photos, Was There a Jewish Eye?,The New York Times, July 7, 2002
"To be a great photographer, Garry Winogrand liked to
claim during the 1970's, it was first of all necessary to be Jewish.
The best ones, in his opinion - past and present, himself included,
naturally - shared this birthright. Jewish photographers by his definition
were nervy, ironic, disruptive of artistic norms and proud outsiders.
Eugène Atget, he happily argued (on no genealogical grounds),
must have been Jewish because his photographs of French life on the
tattered fringes seemed so Jewish in spirit. As generalizations go,
Winogrand's semi-serious barroom boast has a lot of evidence
to back it up. In no other visual art form except cinema over the
last 100 years were Jews such a shaping force. From first decade to
last, in fine art, reportage, portraiture, fashion and especially
street photography, a staggering number of influential figures have
been Jewish. To list just a few: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul
Strand, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
André Kertesz, Brassaï, Erich Saloman, Martin
Munkasci, Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lisette
Model, Helen Levitt,Weegee, Aaron Siskind,
Margaret Bourke-White, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon,
Arnold Newman, Robert Frank, William Klein, Elliott
Erwitt, Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander,
Annie Liebovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz
and Nan Goldin. Winogrand was by no means alone in observing
that a vast number of the outstanding 20th-century photographers were
Jewish. Over the years, a few curators have noted the fact in private,
as have some Jewish photographers themselves. 'I've had this conversation
with many of my colleagues,' said Mark Haven, a photographer
who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 'It's hard not
to notice it. And it's hard to talk about. People can accuse you of
being an ethnic chauvinist ... [Jewish critic Max Kozloff]
suggests, for example, that photographs of New York taken by Jews
show a sensibility distinct from those by non-Jews. It's not clear
who will feel more insulted by some of his ideas: Jewish photographers
who have never regarded themselves as such, or non-Jewish photographers
who, in Mr. Kozloff's opinion, have usually evidenced in their
work a more stable and also a less soulful vision of the city ...
. He seizes on a quote in The New Yorker last year by the photographer
William Klein, who posited an opposition between what he calls
"goyish photography" (the landscape school of Edward Weston and Ansel
Adams) and 'Jewish photography' ('funky' urbanists like Weegee
and Arbus). Mr. Kozloff accepts this division of schools
and argues that images of New York by Jewish photographers during
the middle of the century tend to reveal a unique "social tension,"
which is usually not found in the work of their non-Jewish colleagues."

Picture
this: Jews, Jews everywhere?,Jewish World Review, July 25, 2002
"I'm just crazy about New York: Capital of Photography,
published by Yale University Press, in conjunction with the Jewish
Museum, where a show featuring these photos is now on display. I can't
imagine a more exciting collection of street photography about a city
I find of boundless interest ... The problem is that the [Jewish]
author of the monograph, art critic Max Kozloff, who also happens
to have assembled the show, has other notions. The majority of the
photos he's chosen were taken by Jewish photographers, and he has
attempted to prove that there is a particular Jewish perspective at
work in the way New York has been visualized over the last 100 years
or so. What's fascinating is how all the evidence he's gathered helps
undo his thesis. Doubtless, there are great, great Jewish street photographers,
and many are represented here: Helen Levitt, Ruth Orkin,
William Klein, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand
and Weegee, perhaps most of all. ... What, then, does the Jewish
perspective consist of? Kozloff says that Jewish photographers
bring a 'social tension' to their work ... . Kozloff also wants
to make a case for Jewish photographers as great street photographers,
and this is doubtless so. But his compilation shows that the real
pioneers in this genre -- except perhaps for Andre Kertesz (who isn't
included) -- were all non-Jews, and that later Jewish photographers
drew strength and style from them. Perhaps the most important of the
pioneers is Walker Evans, and I would say that if this collection
proves anything, it is that almost all of these artists came out from
under his artistic overcoat."

Embalmed
Tramp Found in Artist's Studio,Reuters, October 14, 2002
"A British artist kept the preserved body of a tramp at his studio
for nearly 20 years, The Times newspaper said Saturday. The
embalmed body of Edwin McKenzie was discovered in the workshop of
his former close friend Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz who
[was Jewish
and] himself died this summer. McKenzie had been preserved and hidden
in 1984 ... Lenkiewicz often used vagrants as models for his
paintings, which often carried an anti-establishment message."
[ALSO,
at robertlenkiewcz.com: "In 1983 Lenkiewicz exhibited
Project 16. This project attempted to survey as wide a range as possible
of human activities relating to sexual behaviour. He attempted to
do this seriously without attention to the law ... Heterosexual behaviour,
homosexual behaviour, auto-erotic behaviour, bestiality, even necrophilia
are commonplace in our society and most societies, and characterise
more than 50% of all human entertainments. It is interesting that
when the authorities visited the Exhibition to consider closure, the
paedophilia section went entirely unnoticed ... The project attempted
to demonstrate that there was no end to human creativity, that loneliness
combined with human passion could animate a hoover to far more gratifying
potentials than one's wife. The project seemed to indicate that all
sexual behaviour was auto-erotic; from marriage partners to strangers'
underwear."]

Judaism
in Music,
by Richard Wagner, 1850 The Wagner Library
[Wagner, the great German composer, is widely condemned in Jewish
literature as an antisemite]
"According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew
in truth is already more than emancipate: he rules, and will rule,
so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and
our dealings lose their force. That the historical adversity of the
Jews and the rapacious rawness of Christian-German potentates have
brought this power within the hands of Israel's sons—this needs no
argument of ours to prove. That the impossibility of carrying farther
any natural, any 'necessary' and truly beauteous thing, upon the basis
of that stage whereat the evolution of our arts has now arrived, and
without a total alteration of that basis—that this has also brought
the public Art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew,
however, is the matter whose grounds we here have to consider somewhat
closer. What their thralls had toiled and moiled to pay the liege-lords
of the Roman and the Medieval world, to-day is turned to money by
the Jew: who thinks of noticing that the guileless-looking scrap of
paper is slimy with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes
of the arts, with untold strain consuming lief and life, have wrested
from the art-fiend of two millennia of misery, to-day the Jew converts
into an art-bazaar (Kunstwaarenwechsel): who sees it in the
mannered bricabrac, that it is glued together by the hallowed brow-sweat
of the Genius of two thousand years?— We have no need to first substantiate
the be-Jewing of modern art; it springs to the eye, and thrusts upon
the senses, of itself. Much too far afield, again, should we have
to fare, did we undertake to explain this phenomenon by a demonstration
of the character of our art-history itself. But if emancipation from
the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we
must hold it weighty above all to prove our forces for this war of
liberation."

A Case for Jefferson
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He's Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he's Marxian Muscovite.
It isn't because he's Russian Jew.
He's Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
-- Robert Frost, from Steeple Bush, Henry Holt, 1947

Vulgar
tastes in art,
by Theodore Dalrymple, National Post
(Canada), November 4, 2002
"There was a dreary inevitability about the choice of a painting
entitled Arsewoman in Wonderland as one of the four finalists for
this year's Turner Prize, Britain's foremost annual competition in
the visual arts. By their consistent reward of the scatological and
the vulgar, the judges have repeatedly demonstrated that they are
more concerned to establish their reputation for broadmindedness and
lack of prudery than to encourage art of true value sub specie aeternitatis
... This vulgarity, which now pervades the whole of British life,
is of ideological origin. To be vulgar establishes one's identification
with and sympathy for the proletariat: though in the case of art,
the identification and sympathy is not reciprocated, since the modern
British proletariat considers attendance at an art gallery on a par
with, indeed a prognostic indicator of, homosexuality and child-molestation.
However, the proletariat that the artist wishes to join is not the
real, existing proletariat, certainly not in its financial attributes,
but one of a sub-Marxist fantasy. Radical chic, it seems, springs
eterna l... But it is precisely because we have learned to view everything
through a prism of political correctness that vulgarity has triumphed,
and the British art scene is dominated by -- well, rich, callow bastards."
[See: Art links, or, for a more in-depth
view, Modern Art, or "vulgarity,"
or the Marxist "proletarian view."]

Poet
regrets naming Baraka N.J. laureate,NJ.com (New Jersey), November 10, 2002
"Anti-Semite. Liar. Ignorant. D-plus poet. The man who helped
select contentious New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka as his successor
now uses those words to describe him. Gerald Stern says he
regrets that he recommended Baraka for the honor of poet laureate,
but he's not sure the title should be taken away from him, as some
are demanding. 'I made a mistake," Stern said. 'I'm sorry I
appointed him. There were many other poets we could have appointed.
We did it out of good will. We thought it was important to select
a prominent New Jersey figure who represents the black community'
... Baraka has been accused of anti-Semitism because his poem implies
that Israel had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Gov.
James E. McGreevey has called for his resignation. But Baraka has
refused to step down and has repeatedly denied he is anti-Semitic.
'He claims he is not an anti-Semite, but of course that is bull,'
said Stern, who is Jewish' ... 'He's full of (expletive) and
he's an evil son of a (expletive) for starting that myth here. I think
he is an (expletive). The poem is not even good. I give it a D-plus
or a C-minus grade as a poem. In terms of its truth, I give it an
F-minus' ... Stern, a Lambertville resident, was appointed
by former Gov. Christie Whitman as the state's first poet laureate
in 2000 after a committee of poets nominated him ... . 'I'm nervous
about censorship," he said. "But I'm not going to be the first person
in line to defend his right to free speech. I'll let people who worry
about the First Amendment do that.'" Question
for book award judges: Is this reading really necessary? Michael Kinsley
confessed that he didn't read the 402 books he was supposed to evaluate.
High literary crime or a case for Evelyn Wood's seven-day course?,Philly.com, December 3, 2002
"Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? A National Book
Awards judge just did it - possibly with hundreds of books - and he's
practically bragging. Late last month, former Slate editor-in-chief
Michael Kinsley, a National Book Awards judge this year in
nonfiction, rocked the sedate world of book prizes. He wittily informed
readers in a Slate piece that he hadn't read many of the books assigned
to him. He suggested that he hadn't even read every page of the book
to which his committee gave the prize on Nov. 20: the latest mammoth
volume in Robert Caro's gargantuan LBJ biography ... In his sardonic
piece about the awards experience, Kinsley declared that his motives
for becoming a judge after that 'were ignoble - mainly vanity and
a desire for free books.' Kinsley joked that his taking on
the task was 'especially hypocritical because two things I have long
claimed to oppose in principle are books and awards. Nonfiction books
are especially regrettable. There is too much nonfiction going on
in the world already without writers adding to it.' When the 402 books
he was expected to read over six months started arriving, he panicked.
He admitted that solely by 'bold and fearless procrastination,' and
'without my having to crack a single spine,' he cut the pile from
402 to under 50. In the closest thing to justifying his behavior within
a mischievous, lighthearted piece, Kinsley asserted that awards
were 'the purest example of gratuitous or superfluous meritocracy,'
that comparing different sorts of nonfiction reeked of 'inherent arbitrariness'
... Even in his latest Slate piece, Kinsley warns readers:
'[D]on't expect total honesty.'" [RELATED ARTICLE:
The man who won the award that Kinsley (who is Jewish) judged
-- without reading too much -- was also Jewish -- Robert Caro.
Also, at least 2 of the 4 National Book Award winners noted in the
following piece, plus a special "lifteime achievement" winner,
were Jewish: Ruth Stone, Robert Caro, and Philip Roth] A
First Novel Gets National Book Award, by Dinitia Smith, from:
New York Times, November 21, 2002
"The National Book Award for Fiction went to a relatively unknown
author, Julia Glass, last night for her first novel ... After being
a finalist twice before for the nonfiction award, Robert A. Caro
finally won it last night for 'Master of the Senate: The Years of
Lyndon Johnson" (Knopf) ... The poetry award went to Ruth Stone,
87, for her eighth collection ... Nancy Farmer won the Young People's
Literature award ... [Host Steve] Martin also introduced Philip
Roth, who received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters. Noting that Mr. Roth had won two
National Book Awards himself, Mr. Martin wondered aloud, 'If he's
so great, where's his Golden Globe, his Emmy, his house's layout in
In Style magazine?' ... In his speech he praised the American language
and the freedom that America gave his Jewish parents in Newark. He
decried the self-division of Americans into subgroups, like 'American
Jewish.' Those labels, he said, are 'self-limiting.'"

U.S.
Deports Dozens of Israelis,
Los Angeles Times (from Associated Press, March 6, 2002
"Authorities have arrested and deported since early last year
dozens of young Israelis who represented themselves as art students
in efforts to gain access to restricted buildings and homes, U.S.
officials said. The Israelis tried to get inside sensitive federal
office buildings and the homes of government employees, the officials
said. A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration -- which
first characterized the activities as suspicious -- said the youths'
actions 'may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity.'
Immigration officials deported the Israelis for visa violations; no
criminal espionage charges were filed ... The arrests, made in an
unspecified number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida,
came amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious
behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and 'attempting
to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings' ... The DEA
report said a majority of the students questioned by U.S. investigators
acknowledged having served in units of the Israeli military specializing
in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive
ordnance. The DEA said one person questioned was the son of a two-star
Israeli general, one had served as the bodyguard to the head of the
Israeli Army and another served in a Patriot missile unit. Most Israeli
men and women are conscripted into their nation's military service
at age 18. A Justice Department official, who also asked not to be
identified, said investigators have been aware of some 'alleged linkage'
between the students and alleged espionage activities in the United
States since early 2001, and said authorities have made arrests in
Dallas, Chicago, San Diego and in south Florida."

Spat
over painting sparks debate on free speech for Vancouver Jews,Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 19,
2002
"The relationship between art and Jewish sensitivities can be
a rocky one ... Vancouver artist Jeannie Kamins says she is
facing a different kind of censorship. Kamins’ art is being
shown at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Vancouver. But she
recently had to remove one of her pieces, a portrait of Canadian Parliament
member Svend Robinson, after members of the Jewish community told
the JCC that they found it offensive. Kamins’ 'offense' is
that Robinson is a fierce critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.
During an April 2002 visit to the West Bank, Robinson appeared on
television confronting Israeli soldiers as he attempted to reach the
besieged headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Robinson later declared that the Israeli government and military were
'guilty of torture and murder.' Kamins said she painted Robinson’s
portrait in 1992 'as part of a series of portraits of people who I
feel have integrity, political commitment and who are controversial.'
She added that she included Robinson’s portrait in the exhibition
not to offend, but because it represented one of her best works. 'It’s
outrageous that I should be judged by what I put in when it was not
a political piece, but a picture of a man sitting on a bench. This
is not free speech,' Kamins said ... Claire Belilos, a member
of Vancouver’s Jewish community, disagrees. 'When you exhibit somewhere,
you have to consider their values and policies, and if you don’t like
those policies, you go elsewhere,' she said. “I think Kamins showed
a total lack of sensitivity by exhibiting that piece, because Svend
has proven by his actions and words that he’s an enemy of Israel.
How would you like it if she painted a portrait of Hitler and showed
it there, at the JCC, calling it free expression?' Rabbi Barry Leff,
who leads the Beth Tikvah Congregation & Center in Richmond, British
Columbia, agreed with Belilo ... Gerry Zipursky, the JCC’s
executive director, told Vancouver’s weekly Jewish newspaper that
he would discuss the issue at a future board meeting. He said Kamins
agreed to remove the painting from the exhibit after she was informed
that there had been some complaints, particularly from Holocaust survivors.
He added, however that the removal of the piece was not about freedom
of expression. 'We are clear about our loyalty and support and relationship
with Israel,' he said. “That doesn’t mean to say that there can’t
be freedom of expression, but if people try to make issues political
in nature, in our view, we try to remain apolitical.” Kamins isn’t
buying that explanation. 'I think the people who complained about
that portrait want to stifle controversy,' she said. 'They’re pig-headed,
narrow-minded bigots.'”

The family that
bankrolled Europe,BBC News, July 9, 1999
"The decision to auction 250 artworks owned by the famed Rothschild
banking dynasty is a measure of how the once-great family has fallen.
Rosie Millard reports on one of the auctions of the year. The
collection of paintings, pieces of furniture and decorative objects
were stolen by the Nazis in 1938 and only returned to the family in
February this year. They were put up for sale because family members
no longer have homes opulent enough in which to display them. The
treasures, which together made up one of Europe's foremost private
art collections, went under the hammer for £57m at Christie's auction
house in London on Thursday. The collection, which included a beautifully
illustrated 16th Century prayer book that sold for almost £8.6m, was
formed by Baron Nathaniel Rothschild, who died in 1905. Ownership
passed to his brother, Baron Albert, but, in 1938, the collection
as seized by the German Reich within hours of Hitler annexing Austria.
The brothers were descendants of Mayer Amschel Rothschild,
who rose from a Frankfurt ghetto to establish the now legendary banking
house ... Nathan Rothschild, one of Mayer's five sons, established
the British arm, which went on to become massively influential in
the UK economy. The dynasty has been credited with 'bailing out' the
British government on more than one occasion. Like his other brothers,
who set up branches in Paris, Vienna and Naples, Nathan profited from
the Napoleonic wars, which finished in 1815. He is said to have ridden
alongside the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. On realising
a British victory, he dashed back to London and brought government
stocks before anyone else knew of Napoleon's defeat. By the time the
business had passed to the next generation, the Rothschilds were influencing
the national economy and politics of several European countries. In
1875, Lionel Rothschild - the first Jew to enter British parliament
- was, with a few hours notice, able to lend the £4m that allowed
the British government to take control of the Suez Canal. Benjamin
Disraeli, prime minister at the time, is said to have commented:
'You can't have too many Rothschilds.' But the family's powerful reputation
made them a prime target for the Nazis, who seized the Rothschilds'
property shortly before the war. Most of the art collection on sale
at Christie's was hidden by Hitler's forces in salt mines."

Chagall
& Chanel Brodovitch's genius,
by Robert Fulford, National Post (Canada),
January 11, 2003
"Modern art made its way into the visual culture of North America
by what once seemed an unlikely route, the pages of elite fashion
magazines. Beginning in the 1930s, a few eager cultural entrepreneurs,
Alexey Brodovitch being the most talented and persuasive, smuggled
avant-garde painting, design and photography into the New World as
backdrops for elegant couture. More than any other individual, Brodovitch
(1898-1971) presided at the marriage of high art and chic, a marriage
that remains intact today. Kerry William Purcell's elegant new book,
Alexey Brodovitch (Phaidon, 272 pages, $99.95), describes an elaborate
process of infiltration and assimilation, by which Brodovitch
and Harper's Bazaar magazine taught New York, and then America,
how to stop worrying and love modernity. ... Within a couple of years,
Brodovitch had opened a new era, the first great age of the
art director. He stayed with Snow for nearly a quarter of a century,
1934 to 1958, and eventually influenced at least half the graphic
designers and three-quarters of the photographers in the world. As
Truman Capote wrote in 1959: 'What Dom Perignon was to champagne,
Mendel to genetics, so this over-keyed and quietly chaotic Russian-born
American has been to the art of photographic design and editorial
layout....' Brodovitch found fresh ways to give consumer fantasies
an elevated, cultured background, showing a generation of designers
how to set ridiculously priced dresses in an environment of good design
and high art. It was value-added symbolism: Art heightened the worth
of relatively mundane physical objects. He also found a way to make
startling ideas acceptable by placing wild Surrealist images in pages
that were laid out with architectural solidity ... Another photographer
who worked for him, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, developed an on-location
fashion style, taking clothes to distant corners of the world for
exotic backgrounds, an approach that's been enriching the world's
airlines ever since. Brodovitch figured out how to orchestrate
the separate fields of photography, fashion, typography and illustration.
He may have been the first designer who saw the two-page spread as
a single unit; certainly, he exploited that idea more effectively
than anyone else. He learned from the Surrealists how to use the power
of juxtaposition, unlikely combinations of images side by side. He
encouraged highly imaginative photography and refused to settle for
less. He became a great teacher of photographers, such as Art Kane,
Irving Penn and, above all, Richard Avedon. [All
Jewish] No one ever called him amiable, and few found him charming.
... He was often away from his post, executing freelance commissions
for Saks Fifth Avenue, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein
[All Jewish] and other clients of his own. He also contributed
to the pretentious and much-parodied Great Ideas of Western Man series
of advertisements, through which the Container Corporation sought
to shine its image by publishing quotes from Plato, Rousseau and Jefferson,
and illustrating them with elegant abstractions derived from modern
art. There was something else that limited his power: the four-martini
lunches that eventually became habitual and must have led to some
drowsy, boss-annoying afternoons. In 1958, management finally replaced
him with Henry Wolf, who went on to be one of the stars of
the next historic generation, at Esquire and elsewhere."

[Variants of the Jewish art hustler, exhibit #9,454
-- the architect.]The Libeskinds’:
His Bronx Story Fused With Hers,New York Observer, March 6, 2003
"Call them Mr. and Mrs. Ground Zero: Daniel and Nina
Libeskind, with their short gray hair, black ensembles, leather
jackets and artsy glasses, are steeling themselves for what is perhaps
New York's hottest political crucible of the moment - the rebuilding
effort at the World Trade Center ... But in the decade or so since
Daniel, the distinguished professor, and Nina, who shares
a starring role in Studio Daniel Libeskind as the driving force
of its business side, have been designing actual buildings rather
than promoting architectural education, they have become a political
force to be reckoned with. The couple has, since taking on commissions
as politically volatile and public as the Jewish Museum in Berlin
and the controversial addition to Britain's Victoria & Albert Museum,
come to know their way around a tricky commission-and both are essential
to the operation ... Friends and acquaintances credit Ms. Libeskind
with translating her husband's talent into competitive bids for
commissions all over the world, and with managing massive staffs and
budgets ... As the company grows and takes on more and more commissions
around the world, Ground Zero will become its most closely scrutinized
and uniquely challenging endeavor ... When Daniel and Nina
took the stage in the small German city of Osnabrück to accept the
commission for a museum dedicated to the work of Felix Nussbaum,
a painter who perished during the Holocaust after hiding out in a
basement studio, the mayor turned to Mr. Libeskind and said
softly, 'This will never get built.' 'You want to bet?' came Ms. Libeskind's
swift retort. The museum opened in 1999 ... With their possessions
on board a freighter to California, where Mr. Libeskind had
accepted a position as a senior scholar at the Getty Center in Los
Angeles, the two went to Berlin to attend the announcement of the
Jewish Museum design-competition winner ... The couple met at a summer
camp for the children of Holocaust survivors near Woodstock, N.Y.
... Their backgrounds were surely different. Nina was the daughter
of DavidLewis, a Russian-born immigrant to Canada who
founded the New Democratic Party, a party with labor support and a
social democratic formula ... After years of effort, [Lebeskind's]
parents were able to break past the Iron Curtain and, in 1957, made
their way to Tel Aviv. The family lived in Israel for two years before
booking passage to New York on the U.S.S. Constitution ... After early
criticism, Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease on the [Ground
Zero] site, has signed on to Mr. Libeskind's plan and vowed
to finance the tall tower that is its defining element."

Becoming
Richard Diebenkorn, Almost,
by John Seed, Art Site Guide"By the time I had my graduate
degree in Painting, it was 1982, the art world was coming to a boil,
and new artists were making headlines. Clemente, Schnabel,
Basquiat--young, splashy, challenging talents--made the work of artists
like Diebenkorn seem suddenly ancient. I continued to admire
his work, but after meeting the man, it was a little like a spell
was broken, and I went through phases of admiring, copying and stealing
ideas from at least a dozen other artists, living and dead. When I
worked for the notorious art dealer Larry Gagosian in 1983, I was
only half an hour from the Diebenkorn's house, but it seemed
worlds away. One day Larry, and his buddy, film producer Keith
Barish spilled out of Larry's office laughing hysterically, like
ten year olds on a laughing jag. 'John', Larry said to me, 'Keith
and I have a riddle for you: what kind of collectors buy Diebenkorns?'
I shrugged. Larry gave the punchline: 'Rich Jews.' The pair laughed
all the way out to Barish's Blue Bentley. How could Barish,
a Jew himself, and the Producer of 'Sophie's Choice' possibly find
the joke funny. To this day I still don't understand. I don't know
if Barish was laughing because he was trying to buy one, or
because he was making sure NOT to buy one. Cynicism can be confusing.
It’s true that by the end of the 80's, owning an 'Ocean Park' painting
was a label of liberal success. I saw one at the home of Norman
Lear, the producer of 'All in the Family.' I recently saw a photo
of Jane Ganz Cooney, the visionary behind 'Sesame Street' in
front of her Diebenkorn. If those are the 'Rich Jews' that
Gagosian was referring to, he chose the wrong people to slam. I suppose
it dates me to confess to the world 'I once wanted to be Dick Diebenkorn.'"

A
familiar sensation?,The Scotsman, April 7, 2003
"The year is 1990. The occasion is the opening of an art show
called Gambler, a self-curated exhibition by some of London’s hip
new artists. The highlight is a work called A Thousand Years
by Damien Hirst. It consists of a decaying cow’s head in a perspex
tank, slowly being consumed by maggots and flies. A green Rolls Royce
pulls up outside the gallery. A man enters. Charles Saatchi stops
open-mouthed in front of the cow’s head. He stares at it for a few
minutes. Then he buys it. Now A Thousand Years has pride of
place in the Hirst retrospective which opens Saatchi’s new
gallery in the former County Hall on London’s South Bank. Along side
it are the other icons of Brit Art: Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Marcus
Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, Marc Quinn’s cast of his own head
in nine frozen pints of his own blood and Hirst’s sheep in formaldehyde.
The Saatchi Gallery, as it is known, will open to the public
on 17 April. Of course, the fur has already started to fly. It is
good. It is bad. It is, according to one critic, 'risible'. It shows
up the weakness of the work. It gives the work unexpected new dignity.
It’s rivalling Tate Modern. It’s so 1990s, it’s just not where it’s
at any more. This last snipe, levelled by ICA director Philip Dodd,
comes closest to the bone. Saatchi’s name is synonymous with
the artists who became known as the Brit pack, who rose to fame in
the early 1990s. This was the era when British contemporary art became
world famous, when the Turner Prize was cooler than the Brits. Fashions
change however ... Within the world that was Brit Art, it is all too
easy to cast Saatchi as the shadowy figure pulling the strings,
all the more because he remains in the background, shunning all publicity.
However, Brit Art was self-starting. Damien Hirst curated the first
show, Freeze, in a Docklands warehouse in 1988 when he was still a
student. He and his fellows were a remarkable group; young, hip and
media-friendly. They probably would have succeeded on their own because
their work was fresh, confrontational and shocking. What
is unusual is that they did not simply succeed, they became superstars.
That is where Saatchi comes in. He had collected art
since the 1970s, from Carl Andre to Robert Rauschenberg. Few people
paid much heed: plenty of rich people buy art. But when the so-called
Young British Artists arrived on the scene, he moved his buying into
the fast lane. Suddenly rather than buying occasional works he was
buying entire libraries, trawling the studios of the East End for
the next big thing. He was commissioning as well: Damien Hirst’s shark
was a personal commission. Saatchi made his fortune in advertising.
In the business, he had a knack for producing adverts with enough
controversy attached - the pregnant man and the 'Labour isn’t working'
series - to generate extra publicity through media commentary. He
knew how to make the media work for the artists he patronised. ...
'He has had a huge influence on the culture of collecting. It was
always there in the US and Germany, but not in Britain. After Saatchi
a lot of people have started collecting - more quietly, but just as
furiously. That is well established now and it’s not going away. "But
the part played by Goldsmiths [College] was also very important.
It was pushing out students, telling them they had to go out and sell
themselves. Damien Hirst was his own great self-publicist. Saatchi
was one more element in that whole brash, let’s-go-for-it environment.'"